Was pardoning Sheriff Joe Arpaio a mistake?

When it was announced that president Donald Trump would be pardoning Sheriff Joe Arpaio, it did not surprise a lot of people. The two for a long time had seemed to admire each others mode of operation. Sheriff Joe of Maricopa had been very vocal on his stance of tough on immigration. He would have been a perfect fit for trump by all standards.

The candidate then had just left the Drug enforcement agency, and it was thus natural to earn respect and confidence of the county. He would go over the next six terms that he was in office to oversee one of the most corrupt and racist departments in the country.

He was plagued by allegations of racial profiling of people from the Hispanic community, and soon it came out in the open that he was indeed doing so. The sheriff would stop[ and frisk those that did not meet his appearance of American enough this was in addition to raiding businesses that were owned by people from the Hispanic community.

Later on, he grew bolder, and it is at this point that he started all businesses that were thought of employing undocumented immigrants and would do so without warrants or the effect such raids had on the business or those that frequented them. One of the biggest critics, in fact, are men who would recite his ills from memory, i.e., Micheal Lacey and Jim Larkin.

This are the former owners of the Phoneix New Times before they sold it in 2013. Larkin was the CEO while Lacey served as the executive editor it was thus not lost on them the extent of ills that the sheriff and his entire department perpetrated.

The duo of Jim and Micheal had always remained objective and factual in all their reporting this would prove to be very strategic for them as their paper received wide following due to their credibility. They had observed and reported on the moves that the sheriff was making which each new day and how his antics became brutal by the day.

This kind of focus on the sheriff did not please him at all and he would incidental ban all reporters from the organization from attending any of his briefings. This was only the beginning of what would follow. The sheriff became bolder and as such instigated an arrest in August 2007 targeting Jim and Micheal. Read more: Village Voice Media | Wikipedia and Michael Lacey | Twitter

This would prove to be a low blow even for him as the outcry that followed from the media and the general public would compel him to release the two and later on drop all the charges. This proved to be one of the final straws in the sheriffs spiraling career people of Maricopa, Arizona and in the last election would elect a new sheriff.